Green Day's frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, was born on February 17, 1972, the youngest of six children. His father was a jazz musician and a truck driver, while his mother was a waitress at a local resturant named Rod's Hickory Pit. Billie started singing when he was just 5 years old and would even visit hospitals and sing to the patients. It was at this same tender age that he was able to record his first song, "Look for Love" at a local recording company-Fiat Records. By the time he was 10, Billie's father had given him an electric guitar, the infamous "Blue". Billie still uses Blue to this day and has several replicas of it. The guitar would be the last gift his father would give him, for that same year, Billie's father died of cancer that had spread throughout his body. His mother continued to work at Rod's Hickory Pit in Vallejo, California, to support herself and her six kids. Billie Joe and Mike Dirnt later worked there as busboys.

Billie met Mike Dirnt in the school cafeteria in 1982. He and his two brothers introduced Billie to the world of punk rock. Soon after, Billie, Mike, and a drummer named John formed a punk band and named themselves "Sweet Children." Before his 18th birthday, and halfway through his senior year of high school, Billie dropped out of to devote all his time to the band. He knew what he wanted to do: play music. John soon left the band to attend college, so a new drummer, Tre Cool (Frank Edwin Wright III), was recruited. Sweet Children was renamed Green Day and before they knew it, they were traveling all over the country with little money and staying at fan's houses. The rest is music history. It was in Minneapolis in 1990 when Billie met his future wife, Adrienne Nesser. They dated awhile and then were married on July 2, 1994; a 5 minute ceremony. The day after their wedding, Adrienne found out she was pregnant. Their son, Joseph Marcicano Armstrong, was born in March of 1995. Three years later on September 12, 1998, another boy, Jakob Danger, was added to the Armstrong family. Today, Billie, Adrienne, Joseph, and Jakob reside in Berkeley, California.